Top PA official: Arafat always supported terrorism

Thursday, July 30, 2009 |
Israel Today Staff

Senior Palestinian Authority official Mohammed Dahlan told PA TV last week that deceased former leader Yasser Arafat had managed to fool the world with his public condemnations of anti-Israel terrorism.

Dahlan said the international community demanded that Arafat condemn terrorism against Israel in order to win land concessions from the Jewish state, so he did just that. But behind the scenes, Dahlan said Arafat continued backing the use of terrorist violence against Israelis, a fact that Western leaders only acknowledged toward the end of Arafat's life.

"Arafat would condemn [terror] operations by day while at night he would do honorable things," said Dahlan, who today serves as top advisor to Arafat's successor, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Dahlan said the Abbas regime should learn from Arafat and begin to again employ calculated and carefully-tiimed terrorism as an official tactic. He said the only part of today's terrorism he doesn't like is that so many groups are running around attacking Israel on their own. In Dahaln's view, all terrorism against Israel should be directed by the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian Media Watch, which translated the Dahlan interview, noted that if he had his way, the forces that in the future would be managing the terror war against Israel would be the PA troops currently being trained by US envoy Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton.

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